Thursday, April 30, 2015

With your support, Presbyterians for Earthcare will remain
committed to Caring for God's earth and its people in 2015. We
will continue to honor and worship God by working within the PC(USA), our
communities, our country, and around the world seeking justice for the
oppressed peoples and ecosystems of the earth.

Are you a Presbyterians for Earth Care member or do you want to
become a part of the flourishing faith and environment
connection? PEC membership renewals are due every year on
Earth Day, April 22. If you aren't yet a member, you can join now. First year memberships start at $25.

In 2014, PEC members along with the PEC Steering
Committee accomplished the following:

Maintained an active earth care presence at the 2014
General Assembly.

Worked with Fossil Free PC(USA) to bring a fossil fuels
divestment overture before the General Assembly of the PC(USA).

Advocated for 3 more environmental overtures before the GA.

Worked to support indigenous fishing rights in the Pacific
NW and to stop the development of the largest coal exporting terminal in
the US.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Blessed be! Springtime, Resurrection and Renewal are
upon us, with the opportunity for hope and for strengthening our reserve for
Eco-Earth-Caring!

In that vein, Presbyterians for Earth Care has been
gathering hope and assembling resources for another opportunity for renewal and
strengthening: “Down-to-Earth Advocacy and Action” at the
beautiful Montreat Conference Center, September 15 - 18, 2015. Please do put us
on your calendar!

We begin with a selection of fascinating choices for
September 15: pre-conference tours near Asheville and the Blue Ridge Mountains
(with a reminder to arrive on September 14 for overnight accommodations).

We welcome the leadership of the Rev. Dr. Patricia
K. Tull, author of Inhabiting Eden, who will keynote for us,
beginning with biblical and scientific groundings, moving forward in creating
social movements for change, and then empower us as we shift to a flourishing
future!

We are equally thrilled to announce that the Rev. Dr. J.
Herbert Nelson II, Director of the PC(USA) Office of Public Witness, will
join us to challenge us in areas of prophetic ministry and public witness, as
we carry the banner of Eco-Justice.

We are honored to host Earth Care Congregations as they
gather with Rebecca Barnes for their Earth Summit. We heartily welcome Hunger
Action Enablers (a part of the Presbyteran Hunger Program). And you will want
to keep an eye out for bright orange -- the Fossil Free PCUSA folk, as they
gather momentum for General Assembly in 2016 and beyond!

Come for refreshment in worship, joy in celebrating
our 20 years of Earth Caring as Presbyterians for Restoring
Creation/Presbyterians for Earth Care, fellowship with others who have
deep passion for eco-justice, and workshops on many current and provocative
environmental, economic and social justice issues of our times.

May you be blessed, and continue to bless the Creation
every season of the year through Hope, Renewal and Resurrection. Amen.

Saturday, April 4, 2015

11 Mary stood outside
near the tomb, crying. As she cried, she bent down to look into the tomb.12 She saw two angels
dressed in white, seated where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head and
one at the foot.13 The angels asked her,
“Woman, why are you crying?”

She replied, “They have taken away my Lord,
and I don’t know where they’ve put him.”14 As soon as she had
said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she didn’t know
it was Jesus.

15 Jesus said to her,“Woman, why
are you crying? Who are you looking for?”

Thinking he was the gardener, she replied,
“Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him and I will
get him.”

16 Jesus said to her,“Mary.”

She turned and said to him in Aramaic,
“Rabbouni” (which meansTeacher).

17 Jesus said to her,“Don’t hold
on to me, for I haven’t yet gone up to my Father. Go to my brothers and sisters
and tell them, ‘I’m going up to my Father and your Father, to my God and your
God.’”

18 Mary Magdalene left
and announced to the disciples, “I’ve seen the Lord.” Then she told them what
he said to her. John 20:11-18

Everything has been in darkness,

covered over in dirt and refuse:

these thrown away flower stems and coffee
grounds

all used up and broken.

These fruit rinds and slimy leaves,

These egg shells and half-eaten remains of
meals,

tossed out of our home and into the world.

The heat has been building in the stillness of
our garden,

witnessed only by the bird that has nested in the tree,

and the snails who are carrying their lives on their backs,

and the cat who lurks on the fence.

Foodstuff gives way to the dirt, as my fingers
crumble the death in the pile,

turning the tomato leaves into the molding strawberries I forgot to eat,

mixing the scraps of yesterday with the leftovers from last month.

The smell lingers under my nails long after I’ve scrubbed the dirt from my skin.

There is an ache in my heart and arms as I
reach into the pile, measuring the heat against my own body.

These memories of meals and moments stick in my brain,

and the weight of the decay resists the turning.

There is so much to mourn in this movement:

Childhood trips to our family compost pile, a
sacred place in our family to which in winter we cut a path and our late
beloved dog wore down to mud and matted grass.

Carrying eighty pounds of compost from its winter
home on our Chicago back porch to the garden to surround the urban corn rows,
letting the juice splash at our feet and legs as the wind changed from biting
to loving.

Elbow-deep measuring with my grandmother,
inhaling the tomato plants as my knees pressed into the ground, to be imprinted
by mulch, another vestige of dying earth around me.

Beautiful, sacred moments, long lost to the
turning of the earth around the hot, glowing sun.

I cannot get them back, I can only trust them
to the God who is making something new in the darkness, calling forth life from
all that has been strewn from our kitchens and lives:

bone upon bone, breath upon breath, heartbeat
upon heartbeat.

Sweet, sacred earth. Somehow, you are made
new—God always finding a way to make life out of the death that we so quickly
accept as the end of the peel, stem, grounds of our being.

These artifacts of our waste gestate and
re-incarnate, resurrecting into what they have always been—from stardust to
stardust, ashes to ashes, topsoil to topsoil.

We mistake this miracle as just a
process of earth, instead of seeing it the building of a just world, where
death turns into life, again and again.

Instead of seeing God making a new way:

Claiming life.

Naming life.

Giving life.

My palms are grimy as they scoop out the hot,
dark earth that has been waiting for the light to be invited in.

Stardust into topsoil, the earth fills the
empty waiting vessel, making space to welcome the fledging plant in its midst,
making space in this death-into-life soil for more life, making space for
miracles to birth more miracles.

It is a new day. Christ is risen.

Alleluia.

Amen.

Contributor: Abby Mohaupt works at Puente de la Costa Sur
in Pescadero, CA, where she divides her time between coordinating volunteers,
meeting with faith communities, and nurturing learning in children. Abby holds
a M.Div. and a Th.M. in eco-feminist theology from McCormick Theological
Seminary. She is the At-Large Representative for the PEC Steering Committee.

Friday, April 3, 2015

In 2012, the world generated 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage with
over half of that amount going into landfills around the planet.

Those landfills are home to 1% of the global population.
Children and their families who are the poorest of the poor live on the
outskirts of landfills. Many use these landfills as a place of work—trading
garbage for cash or consuming salvageable waste in order to survive. What was
food for the dogs and flies becomes food for a family.

•La Chureca is the largest garbage dump in Central America,
located on the edge of Managua. One thousand people live and work on the “City
of Trash” every day. There is even an elementary school located on the dump
with six classrooms.

•More than 2,000 families live on the Bantar Gebang landfill that
lies outside Jakarta, Indonesia.

•Thousands of families call the Tultitlan garbage dump in Mexico
City home while spending 12 hours a day, in scorching hot sun, looking for
recyclable materials to sell and make less than a dollar a day.

•The Veolia landfill 100 miles south of Atlanta, Georgia, known
to locals as “Trash Mountain,” received toxic coal ash from a massive spill
that occurred in December 2008 at a Kingston, TN power plant. Taylor County,
where Veolia landfill is located, is 41% African-American and more than 24% of
its residents live in poverty.

In the time of Jesus, Gehenna was the landfill located just south
of Jerusalem. This was the city dump of Jesus’ time. When Jesus would speak of
hell, it is thought he was speaking of Gehenna which was filled with the
household trash, Empire’s leftovers, and bodies of the dead. With no sanitation
or plumbing systems in Jerusalem, people would toss their urine and feces into
the streets. Imagine this: the streets of Jerusalem steaming with human shit
and pee as Jesus was taken to the Imperial cross of execution. The Roman Empire
closed in on Jesus and his followers, and Jesus’ final footsteps on the planet
were pressing upon the garbage ridden streets of Jerusalem.

As a small child in La Chureca landfill picks through garbage,
as birds and dogs and flies hover over the “what is left,” there, too, is
Jesus’ body, naked, broken resting upon the planet’s garbage. It is with the
poorest of the poor, the poor who make a home and eat dinner in garbage dumps,
where Jesus rests his body each and every day, pushing us to see garbage as
sacred.

It’s all sacred. All of it. The plastic water bottles. The
rotting meat. The Styrofoam. Ripped Clothing. Banana peels. Broken bicycles.
Flies. Rats. Dogs. The poop of the rats and dogs. Seagulls. Children of the
garbage dumps. Their school. Every bit of the “what’s left” is sacred and holy.

There is no division of the sacred and the profane. In fact
there is no profane. On this Good Friday, we sit at the foot of the cross, an
Imperial cross that might have been possibly littered with trash and human
feces from Gehenna and Jerusalem, a cross soaked with blood and dripping flesh.
Without mercy, Jesus was nailed to a cross with those viewed as human garbage
hanging next to him. It is in the nailing that Jesus nails us to each other.

From my garbage in Arlington, VA, to the sanitation workers of
Arlington County who pick it up, to the garbage ridden waters of the Anacostia
River which borders Washington D.C., to the the poor living near the Veolia
landfill to the families of Bantar Gebang; to Gehenna and the human waste of
Jerusalem, the nails on the cross today pierce together what is seen and
treated as the waste of the planet.

Ecofeminism stretches us to embrace it all as sacred, to see how
each and every bit of what’s treated as garbage, the human and the material,
are nailed together.

On this Good Friday, we sit and wait. Together. Nailed together
as the planet continues to be pierced, broken, torn, and rendered. As your
hands and arms stretch out today to toss away a piece of garbage, as your hands
and arms extend to pick-up garbage, we remember the ones who live, eat, live,
learn and are family on a garbage dump. Today we remember Jesus and his
outstretched arms, executed in a city that looked and smelled and was a garbage
dump.

Prayer: Holy One. Holy One of garbage and landfills. We are
nailed together. Garbage and all. May we never, ever forget it.

Contributor:Ashley Goff is Minister for Spiritual
Formation at Church of the Pilgrims (PCUSA) and ordained in the United Church of Christ. Ashley graduated from
Union Theological Seminary in NYC where she fell in love with the art of liturgy. She
lives with deep gratitude for several communities which have formed her along the way: Denison
University, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, the Open Door Community, and Rikers Island NYC
Jail. Ashley also finds life in Springsteen music, beekeeping, urban farming, vinyasa
yoga, and her three kids, loveable
spouse and their furry black lab. Ashley blogs at godofthesparrow.com.